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In America, we spend on average 8000 dollars per person on health care.
When an employer gives his employees health insurance he sets a fixed sum of money for each employee that will pay towards that employer-based insurance.
Sometimes the employer pick up all the costs, other times he picks up part of the cost
And the employee picks up the rest. So if the employer sets aside 5000 dollars a year
Per employee, on average, the employee picks up the rest, and this averages out to
3000 dollars a year. The total adds up to the 8000 a year that Americans pay out to insure all of the insured in America.
On average the top five percent of income earners use half of all the available health care
Dollars in the United States.
For every 100 people at 8000 dollars per employee the average amount of available dollars spent on health care comes to, therefore, 80,000 dollars.
The top five percent of income earners in this hundred people use up 40,000 dollars
Of the available health care dollars, leaving 40,000 dollar for the remaining 95 people.
This means that there is only 421 dollars available to spend per person for this remaining
95 people.
The reason that Republicans and wealthy conservative in the United States oppose
Any sort of health reform and want to maintain the status quo is because as the system
Stands, there is a very regressive method of paying and distributing health care in the U.S. the way it is currently funded. Work benefits basically take non-monetary income
Which is allocated at a flat rate per employee, and transfers fifty percent of that income from the bottom 95 percent of employees, to the top five percent, who utilize the health care system dollars at ten times the rate as the bottom 95 percent do.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that the lower down the income scale one is, the less one can afford to actually use health care benefits and the available dollars
At a rate at which one gets their full share in dollars that they are allocated.
A person earning 35,000 dollars a year is less able to afford to go to the doctors office and spend whatever the total cost of that visit will be than a person earning 350,000 a year. If the average out of pocket expense for a doctors visit, including the co pay, prescriptions and so on comes to 100 dollars per visit, the person at the lower income could not possibly afford to go to the doctors once a month, because their annual cost out of pocket would be 1200 dollar. But for someone earning 350,000 a year, this is not much of a strain on their income Out of pocket expenses are only a portion of what the doctor gets from a patient visit though. For every dollar that comes out of the patients pocket.
More is paid out from the fund that the employer has put aside. If the out of pocket expenses are 100 dollar, another 300 is drawn out of the dollar sum put aside by the employer. So the more you can afford to visit the doctor and shell out 100 dollars in out of pocket expenses, the more that someone else is paying towards your health expenses.
If a 35,000 dollar a year person can afford to go to the doctors 4 times a year, that is 400
Dollars out of their own pocket, but 1200 dollars comes out of the general insurance fund to pay the rest of the cost. Therefore you are using 1200 dollars out of the 5000 your employer set aside for your health care.
However the guy earning 350,000 a year might visit the doctor 12 times a year. His out of pocket expenses for the visits come to 1200 dollar per year, but the sum that comes out of the dollars that the employer put aside for each person’s health care is 3600.
The United States spends about 8,000 dollars a year per person on health care, but it is not equally distributed. Those in the top five percent of income use about $80,000 a year per person, and because there Is a fixed total dollar amount available for the entire population, this leaves LESS than $8,000 dollars a year for the lower 95 percent of income earners.
The wealthy are whipping up the people who are disrupting the town hall meeting primarily because the system that Obama is trying to set up equally distributes this money over the entire 100 percent of the population, while, right now, half of every available dollar is distributed to the top five percent. However because of the flat rate at which employer based health care, with the top 5 percent of people paying no more per person into the overall dollar bank than those in the bottom 95 percent, those in the top five percent are sucking out more money from the health system than is put into for their health care by their employer. The result of this is that the wealthy take health care dollars away from the middle class and poor.
The reason that this can happen is that most employees never think of their health benefits as a form of income. But that is exactly what it is. When an employer provides health insurance, he or she is basically providing a non-monetary income transfer to an employee, one that is not taxed. Because the employee really never sees this income listed as a dollar amount on their paycheck, nor do they see a tax deduction for that income, they forget that they are receiving this income. However because of the method by which the employee makes use of this income, he never receives the complete dollar sum unless he is able and willing to spend money himself. Those who can afford to spend more out of pocket not only get the full income allocated for them, they also get to tap into the monies that those who cannot afford to pay out of pocket leave in the heath dollar pool.
This is another case of the middle class and poor funding the lifestyle of the well-to-do.
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